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The first editions of the list went up on Chowhound in May 2014, and received so many comments, suggestions and updates that Hyperbowler posted version 2.0 in September of that year. It took 18 months for version 3.0 to come out, after many of Chowhound’s prolific, opinionated contributors stormed off the site en masse last year after a round of major changes,

The guide is cursory in its detail but rich in links: For more information about a given restaurant, you’ll be connected to Yelp pages for basic information, plus discussions of individual restaurants on Hungry Onion and Chowhound, not to mention the occasional news story (mine included). The guide isn’t just astonishing in its comprehensiveness but also for tracking the increasing diversity of regional cuisines in the Bay Area. Sichuan, Taiwanese and Shanghai-style restaurants are now everywhere — Uighur, Tianjin, Wuxi, less so. (Emerging trends: Shaanxi food, Hunan and Guilin noodle houses.)

Hyperbowler, a San Franciscan who works on the Peninsula and travels everywhere, has spent hours translating menus and studying Yelp and Chowhound pages. But the crowd-sourced guide is actually testament to the collective expertise of the dozens of Chowhound and Hungry Onion posters who have helped assemble it. “What’s amazing about having such a broad group of contributors is that people living in neighborhoods around the Bay Area report on their neighborhood and on regional dishes that would go under the radar,” he says.